I am indebted to Samuel Bostaph for giving me an opportunity to clarify my perhaps-too-cryptic and perhaps-too-caustic criticism of his usage of the word "intervention". It is the assumptions silently underlying the usage that need to be excavated and explored. If he is innocent of my implied criticism I would be delighted, and happy to apologize, and to congratulate him. Bostaph refers to "Mises's criticisms of government intervention into the market process". What's missing here is a recognition of the role of government in the first place. Adam Smith observed that the primary role of government is to protect the rights of property (hence he supported property taxation). He understated the case. Governments originate first to seize and then to protect and administer lands and natural resources. "Administering" them entails distributing them politically, almost always with great inequity and corruption. That is the great and original and ongoing "government intervention". That is not limited to ancient history; it is the history of the U.S. It is not limited to 19th Century public land policy, as newly appreciated resources are still being privatized: the radio spectrum, fishing licenses, water licenses, air pollution licenses, for example. And of course old ones are defended and serviced and expanded. What we call markets then entail dealings among people weighted by purchasing power, much of it derived from rents, rents in turn derived from the original and ongoing political acts. There is also a perversion of investment. A part of what we call "investment" is rather rent-seeking, as when people divert water prematurely in order to establish prior "rights". They expend real social capital, not to create new capital but to acquire pre-existing natural resources. What I believe is "loaded" is to apply the term "intervention" selectively to efforts to redress the balance, while ignoring the original and ongoing causes of imbalance. Mises defines(p. 20)interventionism as "a limited order by a social authority forcing the owners of the means of production and entrepreneurs to employ their means in a different manner than they otherwise would." The silent premise here is that existing ownerships involved no "intervention". We observe in Colombia today, for example, how landownership originates in or is maintained by force and fraud, including the "intervention" of governments on the winning side. We observe in the overreaching concept of "national defense" employed by governments in certain nations an exaggerated and guilty fear that those whom they dispossessed in their imperialist expansions will strike back and reclaim their own. (A rather ludicrous but real example was the Reagan administration's panic that the Sandinista's of Nicaragua would invade Texas. More widespread is the current apprehension that destitute and powerless Mexicans who immigrate to work for Yankee employers at survival wages, and rarely vote, are threatening to repossess California for la raza.) In the U.S.A., almost all land title chains go back to some government, usually the U.S. government, that appropriated the land originally. Then it transferred the land to selected individuals (including corporations) in the manner that the "intervening" government chose. For some details, consult the extensive works of economic historian Paul Gates, and others. Note also Mises' key word "otherwise". Otherwise than what? Otherwise than what would occur given the water supplies, highways, harbors, and other gifts to landowners of a pork-barreling government whose revenues come from taxing labor? Otherwise than what landowners choose to do in the presence of the preferential treatment of unearned increments as "capital gains"? Otherwise than what would occur absent the present focus of Federal taxation on payrolls? There seems to be in the back of Mises' mind a Platonic prototype of a pure market that antedates and transcends governments - that is, I submit, a delusion. The above is probably part of what Lipsey and Lancaster and others had in mind when they popularized the term "second-best". It is part of what J.K. Galbraith had in mind with his "countervailing power" concept (although I think he misapplied it). Here and there, I surmise, a diligent search would find in Mises and his allies criticism of the landowners' pork barrel, which is to their credit. My belief, however (which is subject to challenge and correction) is that those who use the word "intervention" (to which let us add the sneer "social engineering") mostly aim their barbs at support for labor unions, minimum wage laws, removal of tax loopholes for landowners and corporations, restraints on pollution, etc. "Intervention" has become their codeword - hence my hypersensitivity to it. Mises' ally Hayek, whose macro had a lot of steam in the 1920's, and (in my opinion) a lot of potential merit, rather blew it all after 1929 when he prescribed lower wages as the cure-all for the depression, overlooking all of Hoover's cartels, rigid high r.r. and utility rates, pyramiding of holding companies, employer associations, and other faults of property owners. I don't know if he used the term "intervention", but his mindset lives on among many who do. Veblen insightfully pointed out years ago that a single corporation per se is inherently a combination of individual "capitals" in collusion, in restraint of trade. The legal framework for corporations, with their immunities and privileges, is certainly an "intervention". Yet, only when several corporations collude is it restraint of trade - and for the last many years, not even then. OTOH, before the Wagner Act and after Taft-Hartley, workers combining in unions are accused of restraining trade. Enough, already! Thank you for reading so far. Mason Gaffney